Six Characters in Search of an Author: The Question Mark over Theater and Reality
Before entering the Boroughs Theatre, I was prepared to sit down quietly with the company I brought to see Six Characters in Search of an Author. Once past the theater threshold, however, I was surprised by the actors already out on the stage before the play was set to start. As I waited for something, I began to forget that I was there to watch a play. The boisterous Actors play exaggerated versions of themselves; they live on the stage, and bring us into their own world of theater. They do warm ups, laugh, push the set into place, chatter, and the Leading Actress, Annabelle O’Neill ‘27 — playing herself — leads the rest of the cast to wait for direction. The audience gets a backstage pass to the theater, which thrusts us into a world of verisimilitude. While this “play-within-a-play” structure confounds the audience, it speaks to questions that the author, Luigi Pirandello — an Italian playwright who wrote Six Characters in 1921 — asks to explore the efficacy of illusion and realism in theater.
In my interview with Professor and Director Steve Vineberg, I was most curious about the ways in which he highlights Pirandello’s questions about reality with this Holy Cross production. The play officially begins when The Director, played by former Holy Cross Alum Eric Butler ‘06, enters and begins rehearsal for the play-within-the play, Pirandello’s own The Rules of the Game. The script, adapted by Vineberg, calls for actors from the Holy Cross Theatre department. This adjustment of the original script, which calls for a troupe of professional actors, is based on the suggestion of another longtime Holy Cross professor, Ed Iser, and minimizes what Vineberg calls the “leaps for the audience” to believe in the setting. Of course the audience will believe they are situated in the Boroughs Theatre, watching a production by Holy Cross actors, because they are. Rather than presenting its audience with theater as an illusion, this metaproduction recognizes the very reality in which the audience, the actors, and the setting are taking place. The play explores realism and illusions by blurring these lines between the stage and the audience’s reality.
According to Vineberg, while illusion is crucial to the theater in convincing the audience of the reality on stage, hyperrealism (when the characters are “magnified until distortion”) takes us out of realism and closer to expressionism. After introducing an emotionally overamplified acting troupe that establishes the “reality,” Six Characters interrupts this reality with the arrival of six Characters, members of a strange, complex family, who appear almost as specters out of thin air. We follow the six existential Characters who have been abandoned by their creator, their Author, as they desperately seek to find meaning for their existence. Their Author has written out their stories, their personalities, but without the opportunity to express their story they are left without meaning unless they release their written “melodrama” by acting out the tragic scene they hold within themselves. Their tragedy hangs over the play, over the Characters; it is unknown until it occurs, and ephemeral when it has passed.
When I asked Vineberg what his motivations were in directing this specifically complex and underperformed classic, he recalled first reading Pirandello in his undergraduate studies, but then falling in love with Six Characters in Search of an Author when writing his dissertation — later turned into his first book — Method Actors: Three Generations of An American Style. Vineberg says, “I have always been fascinated by the whole idea of the way actors try to make something as real as possible.” In his study of method acting, he noticed that Six Characters specifically recalls the Stanislavskian technique of “sense memory.” This type of acting calls on one’s memories to elicit an emotional response on stage to create the most accurate, and thus ostensibly believable, imitation of reality.
Despite Pirandello’s diversions from traditional realist theater, Vineberg notes that Pirandello explored this realist tool with characters like the Stepdaughter, played by Meredith Shaw ‘27. The Stepdaughter calls on her senses at the end of act two to recreate her melodramatic scene with the Father, played by Max Cote ‘26. Unknowingly, the Stepdaughter had been prostituted to the Father, and in the recreation of their intimate scene, the Stepdaughter breaks character to say, “I can hear it still in my ears. It’s driven me mad, my mother’s cry!…with my head so, and my arm round his neck, I saw a vein pulsing in my arm here.” The Stepdaughter is calling on her senses, the sounds, the physical reactions, to replicate her feelings and live out her scene. The Characters living the scene in this way create a deeper illusion for the audience, and calls on the viewer to have a real response to the characters and their emotions.
The difference between the Characters’ and Actors’ abilities to achieve these deep emotional moments exaggerates the reality even further. Visually, the Characters appear dressed in monochromatic clothing, early 20th century style, while the Actors on the stage dress as regular contemporary Holy Cross students. The stark differences between how the Characters and Actors appear, and how they act, both in their performances and in their personalities, raises further questions about the emotional validity of theater. When the Characters play out their tragedy, we know they are putting on a performance. But their characters are so developed, so clearly alive, the Actors, and the audience also feel the tragedy. Most importantly, the Characters feel more real and more developed than the “real” Actors, who stand flat against the Characters.
For Vineberg, this blurred line between the Characters and Actors “adds up to the existential pull, one is a parody of the other,” in other words, while the audience knows we are watching characters, we fall into their melodrama—despite knowing they are acting, despite everyone knowing they are not “real” people; they are not even as “real” as the Actors with whom they share the stage. By the end of Six Characters, as Vineberg says, “Something real has happened.” Real emotional release has occurred, and this is not an illusion. While the Son refuses to be a part of any “scene,” in playing out his melodrama like the other Characters, his emotional gravity and grief carries through the audience, and the Actors. Vineberg says, “the fact that they are performing doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
One of Vineberg’s favorite aspects of Pirandello’s writing is that, as he says, “He doesn’t give you the answers to anything…Pirandello has a question mark.” This question mark leaves the audience confused about their reality, and pushes the boundaries of theater into the world stage. The Son, played by the stellar Rowan Laufik ‘26, speaks to the Director: “You’re putting us in front of a mirror that not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace.” The play, and perhaps on a larger scale, the theater, reflects human characters and behaviors, one of which is the desire to express oneself, emphasizing that “we use the stage as an outlet to release expression.”
Vineberg’s production of Six Characters successfully recreates the blurred lines between reality and illusion which Pirandello introduced back in 1921. Despite the span of time, the existential effect is highly poignant and applicable to our present circumstances when, as Vineberg writes in the Director’s Note, “we now live in a world where to adopt illusions as if they were real has become terrifyingly commonplace.” When I asked if “illusion” is something we should fear outside of the stage, he responded that we should be “absolutely terrified!” We have a tendency to believe anything now: what we see on the news, what we see online, and what we read. While illusions and false realities are something we should doubt in the real world, art and the stage can be a place to filter our expressions and the illusions. Pirandello, and Vineberg, show that the illusion on the stage is meant to reflect our reality back to us, asking us more questions, rather than allowing ourselves to believe things at their flat surface value.